Inside MMA's dark ages: Monte Cox lays bare the deals, damage and dysfunction of an outlaw era

January 8, 1999: (L-R) Pat Miletich punches Jorge Patino during their bout at UFC 18.

(Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

It starts in the autumn of 1995, right as Cox leaves his gig at the newspaper to make his living in the fight game, and then covers the next quarter-century of chaotic adventures. Cox, who boxed in his early days, spent time as a promoter, as a manager to the UFC’s stars, and as a true pioneer in the business of MMA. He represented champions such as Miletich, Matt Hughes, Jens Pulver, Tim Sylvia, Sean Sherk, Rich Franklin and Robbie Lawler, along with many others.

He was there when Jeremy Horn showed up on the scene. He was there for the first of Travis Fulton’s 320 fights, long before the unified rules. He was there for the first ever women’s headlining event between Jennifer Howe and Leah Hamilton, which took place at Extreme Challenge 38 in Council Bluffs in 1996. Long before there was a Ronda Rousey, there was Howe, a cigarette-smoking brawler from Utah who kicked the living hell out the opposition.

Through Howe you can trace the steps to Roxanne Modafferi, to Tara LaRosa, to Julie Kedzie, all of those who led to Gina Carano and Rousey.

During his heyday, Cox discovered more talent than “The Voice,” and he’s seen everything from the unlikeliest triumphs to the worst kinds of tragedy. He was there when Bobby Hoffman bit off half his tongue after taking a series of mean uppercuts from Maurice Smith at UFC 17. But the true nitty-gritty details? Hoffman tried to tear the loose chunk of tongue from his mouth at the hospital thereafter, which Cox recalls in vivid detail.

“My only rule with this book was, whatever I put down, it had to directly involve me somehow,” Cox says. “You couldn’t call me and say, ‘Monty, here's a funny story. Put this in.’ It had to be either something with my fighters, something that I was actually there for or I saw or I know about, or that I was the common denominator.”

If anything, the stories are so many that the hardest part of writing the book was in deciding what to cut out. As it stands, there are 41 chapters to “The Full Monte,” and each is filled with color from the Wild West Days when the pay was low, the conditions were often untenable, and the stars of his show worked the local circuit as a pipeline to the UFC.

It was MMA official John McCarthy who constantly urged Cox to write a book, and he had carried the idea of doing just that for many years. When the pandemic hit in 2020, he started putting pen to paper each night from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m., or as he says, “during the times when nobody bothers you.” One of the devices Cox used in telling the stories was to splice in a subject’s own accounts in italics, breaking the narrative as a pull quote might in a newspaper feature.

Yet these quotes — primarily from fighters, fellow promoters and his wife, Missy — are standalone, meant merely to lend perspective outside his own main body of storytelling.

“I talked to people who had written books and stuff, and pretty much every one of them told me, the way I ended up writing it, that I can't write it like that,” he says. “They said, ‘Nope, you can’t do it like that. You need to do this way, and you need to do that.’ But I was like, no, I don't think so. I'm going to do it my way. And I wrote it — if you start reading it — it's almost like writing an article. I mean, if I say that Dennis Hallman upset Matt Hughes twice and all that, instead of just leaving it there, I called Dennis and I got his comment about it.”

In this way the book gets behind the scenes in more ways than one.

If you want to know about the time Cox got Tim Sylvia out of the last fight of his UFC contract so that he could make four times the money in Affliction? Or look in at how UFC matchmakers booked fights going back to when John Perretti was a UFC matchmaker? Or when the UFC booked Matt Hughes into a title fight with Carlos Newton instead of giving Miletich a rematch (which made for some uncomfortable times at the Miletich Fighting Systems)?

Cox’s book, as the title suggests, bares plenty.

July 13, 2002: Carlos Newton (L) and Matt Hughes fight during their welterweight title rematch in London.

(Sean Dempsey - PA Images via Getty Images)

For instance, did you know Lee Murray, the UFC fighter who pulled off the greatest bank heist in U.K. history, lived with Monte Cox in the early days and trained for a bit in Iowa? They thought he was a lovely lad at the time, a perfect house guest.

“The book's quite a mixture — I mean, it's that stuff,” he says. “You’ve got things like Justin Eilers murder [in 2008], and then some of it’s just funny. Some … I mean, Robbie Lawler probably doesn't like my chapter on him, but it is what it is. I didn’t lie about anything. I kept stuff out that I thought would be mean or cruel or stuff that was undeserving. I tried not to do that, but I did tell the truth.

“I mean, Matt [Hughes] f***ed me in the end pretty good out of a million dollars, but … I mean, I’m not mad at Matt because he helped me become who I became in the sport. He was my first really big superstar, and that led to many others.”

Asked his favorite chapter in the book — which is to say, his fondest recollection in a volume of recollections — Cox points to a specific trip to the Middle East.

“Probably the chapter, ‘Chaos in Kuwait,’” he says. “It was just such an interesting, crazy event. I think I did some of my best work there because, I mean, Dave Menne wins, he’s got 60 grand coming to him and the Kuwaiti Sheik doesn't pay. So I stake out the hotel. I'm just waiting. It's time for us to go home, and we still haven't been paid, so stake out the hotel all night.

“Finally, the Sheik’s son came. I grabbed that f***er, and I go, ‘Dude, you owe us some money.’ And we ended up, we got a bunch of [Kuwaiti] money because his dad said he couldn't get American money on a Sunday. So, I took all their money, and we went to the airport, and I think we went to six different money exchanges, but we just kept exchanging until we got our money. The whole thing was nuts. Matt got knocked out by ‘Pele’ [Jose Landi-Jons] out there, and it was a crazy time.”

November 18, 2006: (R-L) UFC heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia punches Jeff Monson at UFC 65.

(Josh Hedges via Getty Images)

As you’d expect from a manager/fighter relationship, some of the relationships are strained. The emotional balance is in there, and so is the nature of a cutthroat business. After all, it’s a business that Cox found a pot of gold in almost immediately. He says that in the first three shows he promoted in the Quad Cities, over the course of just two months, he made $700,000.

That’s why he so abruptly bid journalism adieu.

Now his career has come full circle. He went from a newspaper editor/writer to a big-time fight promoter and agent, to an author who is “mostly out of the fight game altogether.” Those little adventures in between have delivered him to ports all over the world, to negotiation tables and weddings and funerals of fighters he loved, and to fight cards he never thought possible. It even landed him in federal prison for just a moment, a tiny issue with back taxes that has since been resolved.

As for credentials? Cox brings them. UFC CEO Dana White famously used to call Monte the “worst manager in the sport,” perhaps the only endorsement an effective manager should want to hear. If there’s one criticism of a book that delivers you back in time to MMA’s wild beginnings, it’s that Cox didn’t use that quote on the book jacket.

Otherwise, for anyone who wants an inside look to how it was (and how it is), “The Full Monte” is one of the few books that can go there.

“I had a lot of fun doing it because there were so many stories I loved telling, but I wanted not only make it fun, I wanted to make it nonfiction,” he says. “I mean, I wanted it to be kind of like a period piece — you know, this is what it was like in 1996.”

“The Full Monte” is available on Amazon, or — for an autographed copy — it is available by emailing Fiteiowa@aol.com.

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